Times Higher Education is published in the United Kingdom and thus has its own particular, we presume British, view of what is important in education and what is not, and how it is to be measured. Opinions will differ worldwide.

Whether one takes such rankings seriously or not, the fact is that any such rankings become a part of the image of any university. That same image has a lot to do with student study choices as well as the financing of university research by government and private sources.

As Imre Lakatos so cogently posited, a primary unit of appraisal in science is the "research programme", a basic philosophical observation that could also be expressed more banaly as, "whoever gets the money, calls the shots".

"Overall 22 countries are represented in the top 200 [of Europe] list, which draws upon data from the 800 universities from 70 countries in the overall THE World University Rankings."

We obtained our law degree from Stanford University and are glad to see Stanford ranked 3rd in the Times Higher Education world rankings behind Cal Tech in the USA, the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and just ahead of the University of Cambridge in the UK. Much in the realm of university rankings depends on the selection and weighting of criteria.

If one were to define the best education and hence the best university as one which educates "the whole man" or "the whole woman", then Stanford would modernly always emerge on top of any ranking because it is not only at the top academically together with a mere handfull of other institutions but because it is heads and shoulders above the rest of the competition in being the best student athletic program in the United States (and surely the world), having won the USA Directors' Cup for the last 21 years -- based on actual university sports competitions -- as the best in the nation. See NACDA Directors' Cup at Wikipedia where it is written:

There is to our knowledge no comparable record in sports -- and this record is being achieved at a University that not only ranks at the top academically but whose direct environs of Silicon Valley rule the modern world of high tech.

"The combined annual revenue of all the companies that have been founded by Stanford alumni is over $2.7 trillion, equivalent to the tenth largest single economy in the world."

One can also rank the universities in terms of their actual "money clout", i.e. their total college endowments, which of course may not fully reflect their actual sustained current strength, but rather the accumulation of money over time. Money breeds money. According to U.S. News, here is the Top 10:

Another measure are the number of CEOs (Chief Executive Officers) of Fortune 500 companies, compiled by BestColleges.org, CEOs who are accounted for by 38 universities and colleges in the following ranking order:

But what about the ability of universities to retain members of their incoming freshman class, something which CollegeChoice.net rates as 50 Colleges and Universities with the Happiest Freshmen. Here is their ranking primarily by freshman retention rate: Yale, Chicago, Soka University (Orange County, California), Princeton, Amherst, Stanford, Penn, Dartmouth, MIT, Virginia, Carleton (Minnesota), Harvey Mudd (Claremont), Hillsdale (Michigan), Harvard, Pomona, Notre Dame, Brown, Duke, Middlebury, Johns Hopkikns, Swarthmore, Bowdoin, Haverford, Davidson, Tufts, North Carolina, USC (Southern California), Michigan, Naval Academy, Williams, Columbia, Vassar (Poughkeepsie, NY), Northwestern, Washington U St. Louis, Cornell, Caltech, Vanderbilt, Hamilton, Georgetown, Rice, Berkeley, UCLA, William & Mary, Florida, Rochester, Northeastern (Boston), Worcester (WPI, Massachusetts), Wesleyan (Middletown, CT), USMA (West Point), Wellesley (Massachusetts). Interesting is that many of the colleges and universities with superb freshman retention rates require on campus living or college or dormitory housing. That surely must help young students from becoming isolated from their peers and must instill a feeling of identification with the university or college they are attending.

Last but not least we have the year 2016 rankings of 380 colleges and universities in the USA by The Princeton Review, which "surveyed 136,000 students from across the country". They have many rankings lists. Take a look there for many more interesting ways of viewing the university scene.

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Responsible for Blog Content: Verantwortlich für den Inhalt:(required by German Law):Andis KaulinsGartenstrasse 1056841 Traben-TrarbachGermanyContact: first and last name dot-separated at gmail dot com

Both volumes have the same cover except for the labels "Volume 1" viz. "Volume 2".The image on the cover was created using public domain space photos of Earth from NASA.

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Both book volumes contain the following basic book description:"Alice Cunningham Fletcher observed in her 1902 publication in the American Anthropologistthat there is ample evidence that some ancient cultures in Native America,e.g. the Pawnee in Nebraska, geographically located their villages according to patterns seen in stars of the heavens.See Alice C. Fletcher, Star Cult Among the Pawnee--A Preliminary Report,American Anthropologist, 4, 730-736, 1902.Ralph N. Buckstaff wrote:"These Indians recognized the constellations as we do, also the important stars,drawing them according to their magnitude.The groups were placed with a great deal of thought and care and show long study. ... They were keen observers....The Pawnee Indians must have had a knowledge of astronomycomparable to that of the early white men."See Ralph N. Buckstaff, Stars and Constellations of a Pawnee Sky Map,American Anthropologist, Vol. 29, Nr. 2, April-June 1927, pp. 279-285, 1927.In our book, we take these observations one level furtherand show that megalithic sites and petroglyphic rock carvingand pictographic rock art in Native America,together with mounds and earthworks, were made to represent territorial geographic landmarksplaced according to the stars of the sky using the ready map of the starry skyin the hermetic tradition, "as above, so below".That mirror image of the heavens on terrestrial land is the "Sky Earth" of Native America,whose "rock stars" are the real stars of the heavens,"immortalized" by rock art petroglyphs, pictographs,cave paintings, earthworks and mounds of various kinds (stone, earth, shells) on our Earth.These landmarks were placed systematicallyin North America, Central America (Meso-America) and South Americaand can to a large degree be reconstructed as the Sky Earth of Native America."